Participation, a long-standing assessment category on language syllabi, has found a new conceptual life over the last few decades as digital literacies practices have become a part of everyday life and learning. This symposium aims to contribute to discussions of the role of digital literacies in second language learning and teaching and biliteracy development, by considering the ways in which technologically-mediated communication can enable new forms of participation and access, but also the ways in which participation in digital spaces is rarely full and equitable, but is more often than not fraught with questions of legitimacy and symbolic power.

We are currently accepting proposals for virtual presentations. See the CFP for details. Submission deadline: May 21, 2018.

Despite a good command of the grammar and the pronunciation of one’s second language, a non-native speaker often remains identifiable by his way of formulating his utterances, which do not necessarily correspond to those formulations found to be natural by native speakers of his new language. Difficulties associated with what Bardovi-Harlig (2009) called conventional expressions are most particularly found in the area of pragmatics, and these difficulties have attracted more and more interest from researchers in second language acquisition. The current article contributes to this research trend with an examination of a corpus constiting of responses to a discourse completion task completed by native speakers of French and Anglophone learners of French, with the goal of identifying those linguistic sequences preferred by the two groups in their realization of the speech act of questionning. The results reveal important differences between the natives’ and nonnatives’ use of linguistic stereotypes in formulating questions. In particular, the nonnatives tend to establish a one-to-one association between a linguistic string and a type of question.